We begin today’s roundup with Eugene Robinson’s analysis at The Washington Post regarding Jared Kushner and the growing controversy regarding his alleged involvement in the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russian officials:
It’s hard to write about Jared Kushner without going straight to the Icarus cliche — hubris, flying too close to the sun, falling into the sea. I once wrote that he was the only one of President Trump’s close advisers who couldn’t be fired, but Kushner’s father-in-law would be smart to prove me wrong. [...]
The White House should thus be settling in for a long siege. The good news, from Trump’s point of view, is that his senior aides are discussing how to set up a “war room” to handle communications about the scandal, theoretically letting the rest of the administration get on with governing. The bad news is that Kushner has been involved in those discussions — when instead he should have been cleaning out his office.
Matthew Rosenberg, Mark Mazzetti and Maggie Haberman report at The New York Times:
Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, was looking for a direct line to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — a search that in mid-December found him in a room with a Russian banker whose financial institution was deeply intertwined with Russian intelligence, and remains under sanction by the United States.
Federal and congressional investigators are now examining what exactly Mr. Kushner and the Russian banker, Sergey N. Gorkov, wanted from each other. The banker is a close associate of Mr. Putin, but he has not been known to play a diplomatic role for the Russian leader. That has raised questions about why he was meeting with Mr. Kushner at a crucial moment in the presidential transition, according to current and former officials familiar with the investigations.
Walter Shapiro write at The Guardian about what Kushner may look forward to:
in all his fantasies about conquering Washington at Donald Trump’s side, Kushner undoubtedly never imagined being ensnared in an FBI investigation. [...]
If Jared and Ivanka do return to New York – either voluntarily or as part of a White House legal strategy – their departure will accentuate Trump’s fate as the loneliest man in Washington. Trapped in the trappings of a White House that he can’t demolish to build something grander, Trump is surrounded by aides like Reince Priebus and HR McMaster whom he neither fully trusts nor feels comfortable with.
Emma Stefansky at Vanity Fair:
Time and again, Kushner has said that he has no agenda in the White House beyond seeing his father-in-law succeed. “My job is to put him in a good place,” he said recently, before joining Trump on his first presidential trip to the Middle East. But now that Trump and the rest of the West Wing seem to be working to save Kushner, he’s going to need help from members of the administration he has previously worked to undermine.
Over at POLITICO, Matthew Nussbaum analyzes Trump’s new reality:
President Donald Trump hoped to score a reset with his first foreign trip but is instead returning to a barrage of controversy at home.
The Russia probe, already put under the supervision of special counsel Robert Mueller before Trump left, has now touched his son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner—and threatens to fatally distract from Trump’s domestic agenda, including the health care reform bill he managed to squeak through the House.
With Congress still on recess, Trump faces a news cycle dominated by scandals he’s largely created himself.
Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post says Trump experiences life “through the windshield of a golf cart”:
Trump clearly prefers to experience life through the windshield of a golf cart. Once you understand that, his policy agenda and worldview make a lot more sense.
Take, for example, Trump’s hostility to our NATO allies, which has puzzled pundits.
In a meeting with the Belgian prime minister on the same foreign trip, Trump reportedly offered an explanation. He holds negative views of Europe because it took so long to get his golf courses approved there.
On a final note, here’s Paul Waldman take on Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp”:
Monmouth University poll released last week had some dispiriting news for President Trump: Only 24 percent of Americans said he had made progress "draining the swamp," as he promised so many times on the campaign trail.
How could such a thing be? Don't people understand that our nation's capital is now bathed in the cleansing light of Trump's integrity, renewed for a generation by the upstanding example of the president, his family, and his advisers? No?
It's curious, but we may be able to solve the mystery. Maybe it's the fact that Trump continues to refuse to release his tax returns. Or maybe it's the story about the family of Jared Kushner — who, among other things, is a cruel slumlord — seeking Chinese investors for their real estate projects by dangling promises of "investor visas" to those who pony up. Or maybe it's just the fact that Trump has stocked his administration with family members, business cronies, and Wall Street plutocrats.